A chill in international relations

The trouble in dealing with spies and former spies is that one can never be sure when they're telling the truth and when they're spinning self-serving fables. After all, their lives and careers have depended on artful and persistent deception. A high-ranking agent for the KGB and later for its post-Cold War successor, the SVR, Sergey Tretyakov defected to the U.S. in October 2000, bringing...

Viva Las Vegas! Las Vegas. The name inspires a hybrid image, half Disneyland and half Sodom and Gomorrah. It is the fastest-growing city in the U. S., its population having boomed from 400,000 in 1980 to more than a million now. As four new books attest, Vegas is also a magnet for the imagination. Inevitably the authors focus on the four-mile stretch of casinos called the Strip, but along the...